SS: Jay-Z playing at Madison Square Garden. You came out, people are still talking about it.
[Shows video clip from performance]
Your performance was one of those moments where you were shredding. On your songs on some of your albums, you don't take it that level. Why is that?
JM: Being able to do it doesn't really all the time merit doing it. So yeah, there is a theoretical sort of high gear as a guitar player that I could go into. But it just doesn't really work for me all the time as the right thing to do. I have a lot more fun composing little lines and counterpoints and melodies and stuff.
For whatever reason, my internal meter doesn't rock that hard as a songwriter. But I can rock that hard as a guitar player, so when I hear Jay-Z's music, I see an opportunity to have someone else's songs bring out a different element of me as a guitar player.
JM: We both sort of had that rare moment of like musical hang time.
SS: You could tell on stage, it was really great.
JM: I really did use twitter I really invited myself to that concert, by saying I heard I couldn't stop listening to DOA and within a week we made contact and Jay had said to me, "You know, well I'm doing this show on September 11th as a charity event for the widows of the firefighters and policemen of 9/11." And it's so funny I went, "I'll be there let's do that, that sounds great." Not knowing or thinking that it's at Madison Square Garden. I'm just thinking it's like Randall's Island. I don't—it's just in my mind I'm not picturing that I'm saying yes to play at Madison Square Garden.
But as soon as I say yes to that stuff, somebody letting you in on their song, is like sacred ground for them. And so it begins this concept and this conceptualizing of what am I going to do on this person's song to make it better and not weigh it down.